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  • A History of the Book in America, Volume 1 The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World
  • Grantland S. Rice (bio)
A History of the Book in America, Volume 1 The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. Edited by Hugh Amory and David D. Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xxiv, 638pp.

The arrival of The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World marks both the culmination of almost a decade and a half of collaborative work (conducted under the auspices of the American Antiquarian Society's Program in the History of the Book) and the beginning salvo of a planned five-volume series to be published by Cambridge University Press. The volume is an impressive feat of scholarship by almost any measure. Simply put, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World is the best formal synthesis we have on the topic of print and book production in early America. And book historians from almost a dozen nations that plan to follow with their own multivolume projects (including Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa) will have their work cut out for them.

But the appearance of The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World says as much about the time and circumstances of its production as it does about [End Page 132] the strength of its scholarship. It is no accident that nearly all of the nations that are undertaking ambitious "history of the book" projects are former (mostly commonwealth) colonies that emerged (with print capitalism) as nations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And it is no coincidence that these national history projects (together with recent similar projects in literature—by my count, over 30) are coming to fruition now at the very time when the historical construct of the "nation-state" is being undermined by the transnational imperatives of a global economy. As Masao Miyoshi has argued, economic power has been shifting since the 1960s from nations to transnational corporations, what he defines as emerging commercial entities that no longer depend on a home nation and that promote shareholder, employee, and client loyalty over national affiliation. For evidence, Miyoshi cites a study by Leslie Sklair that revealed that of the largest one hundred economic units in the global economy of the mid-eighties, more than half were corporations rather than nation-states. And that number has almost certainly increased dramatically over the past decade and a half of furious business consolidation. The consequences of this shift have been most clearly felt at the university, which has adapted by transforming its nineteenth-century (Humboltian) mission of producing a nation's citizenry into that of providing marketable and transferable skills to a global workforce. And the impact of this transformation on scholarship in the humanities has been no less profound. One could certainly argue that it was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that finally gave legitimacy to the fight against all exclusionary boundaries, whether the border between high culture/low culture, male/female, western/nonwestern, or north/south. By the same token, one could claim that it was cultural preservationists, alarmed by the dismantling of the traditional categories of nation building, that set off what have come to be known as the "culture wars" of the 1990s. The decline of the nation-state, I would argue, has been at the heart of scholarship in the humanities over the past 10 years.

The first volume of A History of the Book in America: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World reflects these tensions in both title and content. The subtle message behind the pressured pronouns and divided syntax of the title? While retaining some of the traditional coherence of a national setting and object of study, Hall and Amory's project promises to follow the contours of an early (perhaps the earliest) transnational industry across the Atlantic, past the "thirteen mainland British colonies that in 1776 formed [End Page 133] the United States" to Europe, the Caribbean, and beyond. In other words, Hall and contributors promise to take us back to a period before the cultural artifact of American nationhood, a point prior in time to when (as Benedict Anderson has convincingly argued...

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